No agency counts every river in every country, so the fairest way to rank "the most rivers" is by how much water a country's rivers and aquifers renew each year: by that measure Brazil leads the world with 8,647 cubic kilometres a year, followed by Russia with 4,525 km³ and the United States with 3,069 km³, according to the FAO's AQUASTAT database for 2020. Canada, China, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Peru and Venezuela complete the top ten. Read region by region, the list shows why: the Amazon makes South America the wettest continent on the table, Siberia's great north-flowing rivers carry Russia, and in Africa, Oceania and Europe a single country leads by a wide margin.
Why a simple count of rivers does not work
A country's "number of rivers" depends almost entirely on where a surveyor stops counting. Every large river is fed by tributaries, which are fed by streams, which are fed by brooks and seasonal channels, and there is no internationally agreed length or flow at which a trickle becomes a river. Figures quoted online, such as tens of thousands of rivers for one country and hundreds of thousands for another, come from national surveys with different thresholds and cannot be compared.
Length is not much better. The Nile and the Amazon trade places depending on where their sources and mouths are measured, and a long river in a dry country can carry less water than a short one in a wet country. Discharge, the volume of water flowing past a point, is a sounder yardstick of how big a river system is, and it can be added up across a whole country.
FAO AQUASTAT's 2020 renewable water figures as the yardstick
The Food and Agriculture Organization publishes exactly that total. Its internal renewable water resources are the long-term average annual flow of rivers and recharge of aquifers generated by rain and snow falling inside the country. External resources are the water flowing in from upstream neighbours. The sum, total renewable water resources, is the maximum amount of water theoretically available to a country each year, and it is dominated by river flow. One cubic kilometre is a billion cubic metres, so Brazil's figure is about 8.6 trillion cubic metres a year.
Dividing by population turns the ranking upside down. Iceland has about 498,000 cubic metres of renewable water per person each year and Guyana about 345,000, while Canada, with 73,500 per person, is the richest of the large countries. Brazil has about 40,700 and Russia 31,000, but the United States falls to about 9,300, China to 1,930 and India to 1,385, because their rivers are shared among far more people. The ranking in this article sticks to the total, since the question is which countries have the most river water, not who has the most to spare.
| Rank | Country | Total renewable water (km³/year) | Of which flows in from abroad |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brazil | 8,647 | 2,986 |
| 2 | Russia | 4,525 | 213 |
| 3 | United States | 3,069 | 251 |
| 4 | Canada | 2,860 | 10 |
| 5 | China | 2,840 | 27 |
| 6 | Colombia | 2,360 | 215 |
| 7 | Indonesia | 2,019 | 0 |
| 8 | India | 1,911 | 465 |
| 9 | Peru | 1,880 | 239 |
| 10 | Venezuela | 1,325 | 520 |
South America: Brazil and the Amazon, then Colombia, Peru and Venezuela
Four of the top ten are South American, and the Amazon explains most of it. The Amazon carries an average of about 209,000 cubic metres per second at its mouth, making it the largest river in the world by discharge; it alone delivers about 20 percent of all the fresh water that rivers pour into the oceans. Its basin covers about 7 million square kilometres across nine countries. Brazil's total also includes 2,986 km³ a year that arrives from upstream neighbours such as Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, yet even without that inflow its internal 5,661 km³ would exceed Russia's entire total.
Two Amazon tributaries would rank among the world's great rivers on their own: the Rio Negro, averaging about 30,600 m³/s at Manaus, and the Madeira, about 30,200 m³/s. Near Manaus the dark water of the Rio Negro and the sediment-laden Solimões, as the Amazon is called upstream of the city, run side by side for about 6 kilometres without mixing, the Meeting of Waters shown at the top of this article, and they do not blend completely for tens of kilometres downstream. The full story of the main stem is in our Amazon River guide.
Colombia (2,360 km³) and Peru (1,880 km³) hold the Andean headwaters and western Amazon lowlands, and Colombia also drains north through the Magdalena to the Caribbean. Venezuela (1,325 km³) owes its place to the Orinoco, which averages about 39,000 m³/s at its delta and ranks third or fourth in the world by discharge. Farther south, the Paraná carries about 19,700 m³/s into the Río de la Plata, but Argentina, at 876 km³, sits outside the top ten.
Russia: the Yenisei, Lena and Ob flowing to the Arctic
Russia's 4,525 km³ is almost all home-grown: only 213 km³ enters from abroad. Most of it drains north across Siberia into the Arctic Ocean. The Yenisei averages about 20,200 m³/s where it enters the Yenisei Gulf of the Kara Sea, and the Lena about 18,300 m³/s at its delta on the Laptev Sea, which puts both among the dozen largest rivers on Earth by flow. The Ob and its tributary the Irtysh drain a third great basin across western Siberia, and the Amur forms part of the border with China before reaching the Pacific.
European Russia adds the Volga, at 3,531 kilometres the longest river in Europe and also its largest by discharge, averaging 8,000 to 8,500 m³/s at its delta. Unusually, it never reaches the ocean: it ends in the Caspian Sea, making it the longest river of an endorheic, or inland-draining, basin in the world.
North America: the Mississippi and the Mackenzie
The United States (3,069 km³) and Canada (2,860 km³) sit third and fourth, close together. The American total is led by the Mississippi, which with its Atchafalaya distributary averages about 21,300 m³/s into the Gulf of Mexico from a basin of about 3.2 million square kilometres, including the Missouri and Ohio. The United States also counts 251 km³ a year of water from beyond its borders, including the upper Columbia, which rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia.
Canada's figure is almost entirely internal; just 10 km³ flows in from the United States. Its largest river system, the Mackenzie, runs 4,241 kilometres to the Beaufort Sea and averages about 9,910 m³/s, while the St. Lawrence carries the outflow of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Mexico, at 462 km³, is the continent's third country by this measure.
Asia beyond Russia: the Yangtze, Indonesia's islands and Bangladesh
China (2,840 km³) takes fifth place, almost all of it generated within its borders. The Yangtze alone averages about 31,900 m³/s into the East China Sea, the largest discharge of any single river in Asia. Indonesia (2,019 km³) is a different case: FAO records no external inflow at all, so every cubic kilometre comes from the heavy rain falling on Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi and western New Guinea, and is carried to the sea by island rivers such as the Kapuas on Borneo, at 1,143 kilometres the longest river in Indonesia.
India (1,911 km³) receives 465 km³ from abroad, much of it from Tibet and Nepal in the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Himalayan tributaries of the Ganges. Bangladesh shows the extreme of borrowed water: its total of 1,227 km³ is almost as large as Venezuela's, but only 105 km³ is generated inside the country. The rest, over 90 percent, arrives from upstream in the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna, which together discharge roughly 44,000 m³/s into the Bay of Bengal and carry about 1.87 billion tonnes of suspended sediment a year, the highest load of any river system. Our Brahmaputra River guide follows that water from the Tibetan Plateau to the delta.
Africa: the Congo carries the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Africa's leader is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 11th in the world at 1,283 km³, of which 900 km³ is generated inside the country and 383 km³ flows in from upstream neighbours in the Congo basin. Nearly all of it leaves through the Congo River, which averages about 41,400 m³/s at its mouth, second only to the Amazon among single rivers, and drains a basin of roughly 3.7 to 4 million square kilometres, depending on how its limits are drawn. The contrast with Egypt is striking: Egypt's total is just 57.5 km³, and 56.5 km³ of that arrives from upstream in the Nile.
Oceania and Europe: Papua New Guinea's Fly and Norway's Glomma
In Oceania, Papua New Guinea (801 km³) far outstrips Australia (492 km³), despite being less than a sixteenth of Australia's size. Its largest river, the Fly, averages about 6,500 m³/s into the Gulf of Papua. In Europe outside Russia, Norway leads with 393 km³, fed by Atlantic rain and snowmelt; its longest river, the Glomma, runs 621 kilometres to the Oslofjord. Romania and Serbia show the opposite pattern to Norway: most of their water is external, carried in by the Danube, which passes through or along ten countries, as our Danube River guide describes.